Reflections on Safety

Psychoanalysis began as a science-based attempt to understand and explain the anxieties and conflicts that drove many patients to hysterical and other symptomatic expressions. Consequently, safety, although implied as the obverse of anxiety, played little or no direct role in Freud’s formulations. Originally, when affects were regarded as derivatives of drives, safety didn’t have a place in the theory. Freud’s emphasis was on sexual excitement, anxiety and guilt, love and hate, mourning and melancholia. Later theorists moved shame, embarrassment and humiliation, and pride and idealization to the fore.

Safety entered the more traditional psychoanalytic theory with a paper by Joseph Sandler on the background of safety, in 1960. Sandler placed safety as the affect that determined whether preconscious contents would be allowed to enter conscious awareness. The strongest argument for safety as a key affect or mental state derives from attachment research and theory. Bowlby and his followers regarded the goal of infants’ seeking behavior and the mother’s response to be the safety gained from the establishment of a secure base at times of danger and loss. A contemporary view of the basis for children seeking intimate relationships would draw on many sources: attachment theory’s seeking a secure base and a sense of safety; self psychology’s seeking of experiences of mirroring, twinship sharing, and idealization; and the traditional emphasis on the desire for sensual enjoyment and physiological requirements. Jay Greenberg (1991) proposed safety and effectance as dual drives. Emmanuel Ghent (2002) proposed homeostatic safety and expansion of functions as two types of needs. I and my colleagues (Lichtenberg et al., 1996; Lichtenberg, 2005) have suggested that, for both analyst and analysand, a sense of safety is an essential feature of the frame that makes analysis possible, and that, in an ongoing analysis, a background of safety provides the basis for an analysand to risk the